Our Week in the Forest...

Blackberries We do hope that you aren’t bored of hearing about blackberries by now!

Our children are anything but bored of them, and we continuously find ourselves full of awe as the children demonstrate how creative they can be. The little forest folk continue to put these juicy treasures to good use in all sorts of wonderful and various ways. We have been face painting (of course); conducting experiments (“what colour will the juice turn if we mix mud with it?” “Shall we do an experiment?”) and exploring the similarities and differences between the individual berries “This blackberry is ACTUALLY indigo…”One of our favourite blackberry-related activities of the week has got to be the opening of Little Forest Folk’s first “nail painting salon”. One little boy decided that what the forest was missing was somewhere for all of us to go and get our nails painted with blackberry juice! Such luxury treatment does not come cheap and we were all instructed to bring blackberries for payment (5 blackberries equals both hands painted, unless you “have a voucher”!) Some lucky teachers even got blackberry facials (eeek!)

Insects and amphibians We have been ever so lucky to spot some very interesting creatures in the forest this week, in addition to our usual resident caterpillars. We were super excited to find some little frogs hopping about, and one very large, fat toad that only one child was brave enough to hold! By exploring more of the meadow we have also found some beautiful spiders and especially enjoyed looking for spider webs in the rain to see how they sparkled. Some children loved watching a particularly large spider catch and eat a wasp! We were inspired by these sightings to build some insect homes and the children can’t wait to find out if anyone will take up residence in one of the beautiful offerings left out for all the forest creatures.